The United States now has its own Gestapo. ICE political police are growing bolder by the day. First, they gathered up Venezuelan refugees without warrants and without evidence and defied a Federal Judge by shipping them to a jungle prison camp in El Salvador. Then, they arrested a Columbia graduate student who mediated between protesters and Columbia University. This week, a young woman who is a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was surrounded on a public street in Somerville, MA, by ICE officers wearing hoods and masks. They grabbed her hands, bound her arms behind her back, pushed her into an unmarked van, and whisked her to an ICE facility in Louisiana. She has no contact with family, friends or her University. The University is her legal sponsor. The Gestapo couldn’t have done it more ruthlessly.
I urge you to watch the video of her “arrest”. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-immigration-authorities-detain-international-tufts-graduate-st-rcna198158
It looks like a gang rape. This was not a normal arrest. It was designed to incite terror in Ms. Ozturk and intimidate others. Just imagine if an American female scholar in any other democracy were treated this way.
What was her crime? She co-authored an Op-Ed piece in the Tufts Daily newspaper. Read it
www.tuftsdaily.com/staff/rumeysa-ozturk
It is not antisemitic. It does not advocate Hamas terrorism. It does not threaten the US.
I am an alumnus of Tufts three times over. I saw the Vietnam War protests as a student and the anti apartheid movement as a researcher at Tufts. Articles in the Tufts newspaper have always allowed people to freely voice their concerns on important issues. I was also a Fulbright Scholar, and I highly value the opportunity to immerse oneself in another nation’s culture. The Fulbright program was created after WW2 to exchange citizens in both directions and promote mutual understanding. Ms. Ozturkis is not just a foreign graduate student, she is a guest, invited by the people of the United States. What is ICE teaching her about American culture and beliefs?
Her arrest was not carried out by the Somerville Police, the Massachusetts State Police, or the FBI. She was not held at a normal facility and afforded legal representation. She was detained by ICE, the President’s personal political police and taken to a facility in red-neck Louisiana. ICE has gone from terrorizing refugees to arresting visa holders and threatening to cancel green cards. Trump has already called Federal Judges who disagree with him traitors and seditionists.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/24/president-trump-judges-sedition-treason/82633394007/
When will the political police come for them? When will they come for journalists and attorneys who disagree with the Administration? When will they come for politicians?
I called my congressman and both Senators to ask when they will raise their voices. I asked why they were silent. When I was asked to give my name and address, for the first time in my 75 years, I felt a tinge of anxiety. How soon before I will start looking for masked men and unmarked vans on my street?
